James K. Galbraith

Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government and Business Relations

University of Texas at Austin

James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair of Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book, Inequality and Instability was published in March, 2012 by Oxford University Press. The next will be The End of Normal, from Free Press in 2014.

Galbraith holds degrees from Harvard (A.B., 1974) and Yale (PhD in Economics, 1981). He won a Marshall Scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, and then served on the congressional staff, including as Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. He is chair of Economists for Peace and Security and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute.

In 2010 he was elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. In 2012, he was President of the Association for Evolutionary Economics. He is the 2014 co-winner of the Leontief Prize for advancing the frontiers of economic thought.

My Video Content

The United States’ deep political polarization is blinding the nation from seeing what it takes to create an effective innovation economy.

Simply put, to many figures on the political right the government is simply a source of corruption and inefficiency, and it’s most effective means of handling innovation is to leave markets to their own devices. The political left, on the other hand, typically retorts that state intervention is necessary for economies to generate innovation because the government is the only entity positioned to mobilize national resources for broader public purposes.

James Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government and Business Relations, University of Texas speaking at the panel entitled "The Impact of Inequality on Macroeconomics Dynamics" at the Institute for New Economic Thinking's (INET) Paradigm Lost Conference in Berlin. April 14, 2012. #inetberlin

Discussion and Q&A at the panel entitled "The Impact of Inequality on Macroeconomics Dynamics" at the Institute for New Economic Thinking's (INET) Paradigm Lost Conference in Berlin. April 14, 2012. #inetberlin

What is a good model in economics? “The Kids” asked a dozen economists in the halls of the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, and we invite you to watch what they said.

Good models are those that pass the test of time, says Philippe Aghion. Brad DeLong presents what has come to be called Friedman’s “F-Twist”: assumptions don’t matter – a good model is one that predicts well. Wrong, says Anatole Kaletsky, economists ought to model the whole range of human behavior, and doing so requires re-examining the very assumptions on which our models rest. And to George Akerlof, a good model applies to the specific question asked; it corresponds to the problem at hand.

When is one theory better than the other? What is progress in economics? "The Kids" asked a dozen economists in the halls of the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, and we invite you to watch what they said.

In 2008, the world avoided making the policy mistakes of the Great Depression. That's progress, says George Akerlof. Anatole Kaletsky tells us what progress is not: to introduce, in the name of rigor, ever more unrealistic assumptions in economics, however mathematically convenient these may be. And James Galbraith compares progress to pornography: it's hard to define, but you recognize it if you ever see it.

My Grants

This project will extend the work of the University of Texas Inequality Project, permitting new data development and research in two technical and at least three substantive areas. The technical projects are: (1) updating the core global inequality data-sets from 2000 through the Great Financial Crisis; (2) GIS mapping of changing inequalities using global and national data. The substantive projects include: (1) assessment of the effects of financial crisis on inequality; (2) inequality and demographic factors, including health, life expectancy and fertility; and (3) a comparative assessment of social, political and financial factors that reduce and increase inequality.